Monday, 9 May 2016

Loans totalling hundreds of millions of pounds to build new schools in the UK could dry up should the country leave the European Union (EU).

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has lent more than £350 million since the beginning of 2015 to build new schools under the government’s Priority Schools Building Programme (PSBP).
The bank is owned by EU members and provides long-term loans on favourable terms for social action projects.

£350 million is of course less than 0.5% of the UK's education budget, and it is not a freebie, it is a loan, and one thing the UK government can do as well or as cheaply as any other government is lend/spend money out of thin air. What matters is the interest saving, given today's low/negative real interest rates, the true saving is close to nothing.

Even if you divide the full £350 million by approx. 10 million school children in the UK, that's a princely £35 each. Divide close to nothing by approx. 10 million and you get...

Life sciences leaders are warning that Britain’s departure from the European Union will bring uncertainty to the industry, creating new barriers to inward investment and threatening access to novel medicines.

In a letter to The Observer, more than 90 signatories - including heads of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and the BioIndustry Association - argue that the future success of the UK life sciences sector is underpinned by being part of the EU’s single market and regulatory processes.

If the UK was to bow out of a reformed Europe, companies could be forced to apply for separate market authorisations in both regions - which could delay access for the millions of NHS patients to the latest drugs and treatments, they warn.

Again, strange. The last time I looked, Switzerland had a relatively successful pharmaceutical sector. I guess that EU rules on which drugs are safe or not are much the same as ours anyway, so there's be no harm in having a single application procedure or mutual recognition or something.